One of the problems with a course on small acreage is that **really** wild drivers get the occasional free pass from driving it on an adjacent fairway.
A great defense for such a property? A modest amount of topographical interest, some difficult angles of approach and small tricky slopy green complexes with bunkers tight up to greenside. That can make any course endlessly diverse. (I'm talking to you architects who build wide fairways, huge cloverleaf or tiered greens, shallow bunkers.....boring!).
Small acreage is a necessity on courses built in urban areas - well, areas that didn't used to be urban but then had the city build around them.
At my second home course at Marine Drive (previously mentioned), the routing benefits from a river on one side and that the course sits on a flood plain with a steep cliff (about 100 feet high). The cliff borders the other side of the property at an angle. Thus several holes have greens or tees benched into the hill and some holes play diagonally across or down the side of the ridge (#18, dogleg left from an elevated tee to a left-right sloping fairway at the bottom of the hill). Including practice range, it can't occupy more than 95 acres.
In some city centers, it would be great to have extra property. But one golf course was rumoured to have been offered a low nine figure sum from the city in which it resided to be rezoned and redeveloped into housing. At that price...